LA Alternative Press
Volume 2 Number 10 / August 20 - September 2, 2003
Carnival d’Art
Cannibal Flower’s eyeball-yanking extravaganzas spotlight local artists’ work, thrill with sideshow acts & great music.
By Lucinda Michele Knapp

The raspberry-colored glare streaming out of the Gershwin Hotel at Hollywood and Western is — for the first time in all the years I’ve driven by — illuminating a huge crowd. A gaggle of see-and-be-seen Downtowners and CalArts types mill around, along with 6-foot-tall drag queens with blue dreadlocks, prim electro-fetish fashion girls, and Silver Lake hipsters with hamster-rock mops and baggy corduroys. A cacophony tumbles from inside, where two drummers with full kits compete next to a large installation that looks for all the world to have been pulled from the set of a space-disco version of Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The drummers square off, louder and louder, the crowd circling tighter, as an artist covered head-to-toe in paint paints madly to the music, faster and faster, messier and messier. All available wall space is crammed with paintings and assemblage works, but for now everyone’s attention is on the music and the painter in the center of the huge room.

A black-clad couple next to me leans in and someone whispers, “They had a sword swallower last time. That was cool.”
It’s Cannibal Flower all over again — as it was last month, and the month before that. The brainchild of artists Leonard Croskey, Michele Waterman, and Jean-Paul Garnier, the Cannibal Flower art show and accompanying performances have, in fact, been going on for exactly three years now.

"We were just looking for a place to hang our art,” said Croskey. “But sometimes things grow into stuff you never expected.”
Indeed. Cannibal Flower shows are more akin to an extravagant blowout of cartoon color, eyeball-yanking imagery and carnival atmosphere than anything remotely resembling a placid and genteel gallery opening. Shows move to new locations every month and have been held at St. Vibiana’s nunnery downtown (picture a pitch-black decaying Catholic school at midnight with artworks glowing under blacklight, neon electroluminescent wire crawling everywhere, and speakers hissing experimental music from confessionals); at Fashion District taxi-dance halls where attendees climbed fire escapes to dance on the rooftop under luminous purple skies; and even at the old Crocker Bank building downtown, where installations filled the long-vacant vault and safe-deposit cubbyholes. Performances have featured everyone from Kitty Diggins and Dave Wakeling to belly dancers, theremin artists, fashion shows, circus sideshow acts and fire performers.

But it still comes back to the art. “We’re a grassroots organization,” says Waterman. “We’re trying to offer artists an alternative to the standard gallery system.”

It’s an alternative that is needed. Los Angeles has little in the way of a support system for struggling artists. Notoriously cliquish, highly Balkanized, and often maddeningly arbitrary, the L.A. art scene is almost impossible to break into without knowing the right people — and the “right” people often seem to change from week to week. Cannibal Flower events show between 50 to 90 artists in one night — instant exposure for individuals who might otherwise get trampled in a sprint to the doors of a Chinatown gallery.
“To get a show [at a traditional gallery],” says Croskey, “an artist has to be able to sell enough work to make it worthwhile for that gallery owner. They have overhead, they have employees, they have their collectors who expect a certain style. So that owner only chooses artists whose work is guaranteed to sell. The system makes it impossible for underground artists to show their work, ever.”

Cannibal Flower sidesteps a gallery’s traditional modus operandi by skipping straight to the opening — the event when an artist can sell the most work and generate the most buzz. Then the show is gone by the next day — no muss, no fuss, no overhead.
“The goal of any artist should be to have people see their work and, hopefully, buy it,” says Mat Gleason, the publisher of the Brewery-based Coagula Art Journal. “Cannibal Flower is a better venue for this. The good art there could be in Juxtapoz magazine tomorrow. It’s never pretentious like the bullshit at the wine and cheese galleries, posing their way into MOCA.”
Croskey is adamant that Cannibal Flower remain democratic. “Anyone at all can show with Cannibal Flower. We don’t worry about selling art,” he says. “We only care about showing art.”

Waterman said she fields hesitant artist queries at every show. “They come up and ask, ‘Where do I send a portfolio? Who do I need to contact?’ And I can say, ‘Me.’ They’re always surprised it’s that easy.”

If it’s really that easy, what about the quality of the artwork?

“There’s so much talent out there,” she says. “We find between seven and 10 new artists a month — think about that! So much, all overlooked. We’re trying to fix that. Sometimes we get pieces that don’t seem to quite work, or fit in — we show them anyway. And then the artists come back the next time with even better work. There’s a friendly competition. These shows push people to grow, to improve.”

Croskey is firm in his commitment to the artists he shows.

“We’ve seen some amazing artists blossom,” adds Waterman, who is working on her own collage piece as she talks. By juxtaposing well-known works with works by individuals of less notoriety, the duo ensures that newcomers can be placed on equal footing with superstars of the L.A. underground like Mark Mothersbaugh, Mear, Kimmy McCann, Anthony Ausgang and Liz McGrath.

Artist Wanyu Chou, whose delicate color-saturated paintings were featured at the Gershwin show, confirms this. “I got some good contacts and sold several pieces. Their goal is to help artists; they only charge 15 percent on what is sold, which is unbelievably low — it’s very different from a gallery space, where they charge a lot more. It was a really positive experience.”

“ We think people should be able to make a living as artists,” says Waterman. “That should be possible for people.”

Cannibal Flower’s third anniversary on August 23rd promises to be their biggest blowout ever. The location is still secret: check www.cannibalflower.com for more information.